Wednesday, October 3, 2007

red brown butt rot

Snappy Title eh? which is to say it is really Dyer's Polypore, or uncommonly called Phaeolus Schweinitzii....and is a fungus found at the foot of fir trees, and is a fabulous dye. My dh and I have been mushroom hunting in the woods and eating chanterelles, and picking red brown butt rot, after hearing it would be a good dye. Dh convinced me to try and dye with it, so under his tutelage I commenced at first dragging my heels, because of course it meant mordanting, then dyeing and generally taking part of my day, but we looked up instructions for mushroom dyeing on the net, and so with a mordant of 25 grams of alum, 10 grams of cream of tartar, and 100 grams of sock wool, voila....and do I love it...it is such a wonderful rich color and is drying by the woodstove as we speak, not to mention it gave me something interesting to blog about.... and not to mention completely free...and there is more out there. We are going to try and experiment with younger fungus and older ones to see if we get different colors, plus changing the mordant. On a totally other front, I have just felted a beret which was out of soy wool and turned out quite sweet....it was a quick felt, I pulled it out after a few minutes in the wash cycle and it was already felted, also have been making some peruvian hats which I will take some pics of also and post....am having fun this week with lots of projects...

5 comments:

Such a beautiful color from a fungus with such a horrible sounding name. Sure, I understand that it probably means that it rots the butt end of the tre but really...it just sounds so much worse, like some awful disease or something!

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About Me

I live on an island off the west coast of Canada, and have been an avid fibre artist for the past thirty years...I spin, dye and play with all kinds of fibres and sell yarns for others to play with...I recently returned to natural dyeing after a short 25 year hiatus into acid dyes, and now am found most days in the woods, gathering with dh, and finding wonderful dye fungi and lichen...could life be more fun?